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Archives for March 2006

Wal-Mart Enlists Bloggers in Its Public Relations Campaign

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Some pro-Walmart blogs fail to disclose origins of copied text

Michael Barbaro 
First published by the New York Times, March 7, 2006

Brian Pickrell, a blogger, recently posted a note on his Web site attacking state legislation that would force Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. to spend more on employee health insurance. “All across the country, newspaper editorial boards — no great friends of business — are ripping the bills,” he wrote.

It was the kind of pro-Wal-Mart comment the giant retailer might write itself. And, in fact, it did.

Several sentences in Mr. Pickrell’s Jan. 20 posting — and others from different days — are identical to those written by an employee at one of Wal-Mart’s public relations firms and distributed by e-mail to bloggers.

Under assault as never before, Wal-Mart is increasingly looking beyond the mainstream media and working directly with bloggers, feeding them exclusive nuggets of news, suggesting topics for postings and even inviting them to visit its corporate headquarters.

But the strategy raises questions about what bloggers, who pride themselves on independence, should disclose to readers. Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, has been forthright with bloggers about the origins of its communications, and the company and its public relations firm, Edelman, say they do not compensate the bloggers.

But some bloggers have posted information from Wal-Mart, at times word for word, without revealing where it came from.

Glenn Reynolds, the founder of Instapundit.com, one of the oldest blogs on the Web, said that even in the blogosphere, which is renowned for its lack of rules, a basic tenet applies: “If I reprint something, I say where it came from. A blog is about your voice, it seems to me, not somebody else’s.”

Companies of all stripes are using blogs to help shape public opinion.

Before General Electric announced a major investment in energy-efficient technology last year, company executives first met with major environmental bloggers to build support. Others have reached out to bloggers to promote a product or service, as Microsoft did with its Xbox game system and Cingular Wireless has done in the introduction of a new phone.

What is different about Wal-Mart’s approach to blogging is that rather than promoting a product — something it does quite well, given its $300 billion in annual sales — it is trying to improve its battered image.

Wal-Mart, long criticized for low wages and its health benefits, began working with bloggers in late 2005 “as part of our overall effort to tell our story,” said Mona Williams, a company spokeswoman.

“As more and more Americans go to the Internet to get information from varied, credible, trusted sources, Wal-Mart is committed to participating in that online conversation,” she said.

Copies of e-mail messages that a Wal-Mart representative sent to bloggers were made available to The New York Times by Bob Beller, who runs a blog called Crazy Politico’s Rantings. Mr. Beller, a regular Wal-Mart shopper who frequently defends the retailer on his blog, said the company never asked that the messages be kept private.

In the messages, Wal-Mart promotes positive news about itself, like the high number of job applications it received at a new store in Illinois, and criticizes opponents, noting for example that a rival, Target, raised “zero” money for the Salvation Army in 2005, because it banned red-kettle collectors from stores.

The author of the e-mail messages is a blogger named Marshall Manson, a senior account supervisor at Edelman who writes for conservative Web sites like Human Events Online, which advocates limited government, and Confirm Them, which has pushed for the confirmation of President Bush’s judicial nominees.

In interviews, bloggers said Mr. Manson contacted them after they wrote postings that either endorsed the retailer or challenged its critics.

Mr. Beller, who runs Crazy Politico’s Rantings, for example, said he received an e-mail message from Mr. Manson soon after criticizing the passage of a law in Maryland that requires Wal-Mart to spend 8 percent of its payroll on health care.

Mr. Manson, identifying himself as a “blogger myself” who does “online public affairs for Wal-Mart,” began with a bit of flattery: “Just wanted you to know that your post criticizing Maryland’s Wal-Mart health care bill was noticed here and at the corporate headquarters in Bentonville,” he wrote, referring to the city in Arkansas.

“If you’re interested,” he continued, “I’d like to drop you the occasional update with some newsworthy info about the company and an occasional nugget that you won’t hear about in the M.S.M.” — or mainstream media.

Bloggers who agreed to receive the e-mail messages said they were eager to hear Wal-Mart’s side of the story, which they said they felt had been drowned out by critics, and were tantalized by the promise of exclusive news that might attract more visitors to their Web sites.

“I am always interested in tips to stories,” said one recipient of Mr. Manson’s e-mail messages, Bill Nienhuis, who operates a Web site called PunditGuy.com .

But some bloggers are also defensive about their contacts with Wal-Mart. When they learned that The New York Times was looking at how they were using information from the retailer, several bloggers posted items challenging The Times’s article before it had appeared. One blog, Iowa Voice, run by Mr. Pickrell, pleads for advertisers to buy space on the blog in anticipation of more traffic because of the article.

The e-mail messages Mr. Manson has sent to bloggers are structured like typical blog postings, with a pungent sentence or two introducing a link to a news article or release.

John McAdams, a political science professor at Marquette University who runs the Marquette Warrior blog, recently posted three links about union activity in the same order as he received them from Mr. Manson. Mr. McAdams acknowledged that he worked from Wal-Mart’s links and that he did not disclose his contact with Mr. Manson.

“I usually do not reveal where I get a tip or a lead on a story,” he said, adding that journalists often do not disclose where they get ideas for stories either.

Wal-Mart has warned bloggers against lifting text from the e-mail it sends them. After apparently noticing the practice, Mr. Manson asked them to “resist the urge,” because “I’d be sick if someone ripped you because they noticed a couple of bloggers with nearly identical posts.”

But Mr. Manson has not encouraged bloggers to reveal that they communicate with Wal-Mart or to attribute information to either the retailer or Edelman, Ms. Williams of Wal-Mart said.

To be sure, some bloggers who post material from Mr. Manson’s e-mail do disclose its origins, mentioning Mr. Manson and Wal-Mart by name. But others refer to Mr. Manson as “one reader,” say they received a “heads up” about news from Wal-Mart or disclose nothing at all.

Mr. Pickrell, the 37-year-old who runs Iowa Voice, said he began receiving updates from Wal-Mart in January. Like Mr. Beller, of Crazy Politico, Mr. Pickrell had criticized the Maryland legislature over its health care law before Wal-Mart contacted him.

Since then, he has written at least three postings that contain language identical to sentences in e-mail from Mr. Manson. In one, which Mr. Pickrell attributed to a “reader,” he reported that Wal-Mart was about to announce that a store in Illinois received 25,000 applications for 325 jobs. “That’s a 1.3 percent acceptance rate,” the message read. “Consider this: Harvard University (undergraduate) accepts 11 percent of applicants. The Navy Seals accept 5 percent of applicants.”

Asked in a telephone interview about the resemblance of his postings to Mr. Manson’s, Mr. Pickrell said: “I probably cut and paste a little bit and I should not have,” adding that “I try to write my posting in my own words.”

In an e-mail message sent after the interview, Mr. Pickrell said he received e-mail from many groups, including those opposed to Wal-Mart, which he uses as a starting point to “do my own research on a topic.”

“I draw my own conclusions when I form my opinions,” he said.

Mr. Pickrell, explaining his support for Wal-Mart, said he shops there regularly and is impressed with how his mother-in-law, a Wal-Mart employee, is treated. “They go real out of their way for their people,” he said.

Wal-Mart’s blogging initiative is part of a ballooning public relations campaign developed in consultation with Edelman to help Wal-Mart as two groups, Wal-Mart Watch and Wake Up Wal-Mart, aggressively prod it to change. The groups operate blogs that receive posts from current and former Wal-Mart employees, elected leaders and consumers.

Edelman also helped Wal-Mart develop a political-style war room, staffed by former political operatives, which monitors and responds to the retailer’s critics, and helped create Working Families for Wal-Mart, a new group that is trying to build support for the company in cities across the country.

At Edelman, Mr. Manson, who sends many of the e-mail messages to bloggers, works closely on the Wal-Mart account with Mike Krempasky, a co-founder of RedState.com, a conservative blog. Both are regular bloggers, which in Mr. Manson’s case means he has written critically of individuals and groups Wal-Mart may eventually call on for support.

Before he was hired by Edelman in November, Mr. Manson wrote on the Human Events Online blog that members of the San Francisco city council were “dolts” and “twits” for rejecting a proposed World War II memorial and that every day “the United Nations slides further and further into irrelevance.” After he was hired, Mr. Manson wrote that the career of Senator Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island was marked by “pointless indecision.”

Wal-Mart declined to make Mr. Manson available for comment. Ms. Williams said “it is not Wal-Mart’s role to monitor the opinions of our consultants or how they express them on their own time.”

In a sign of how eager Wal-Mart is to develop ties to bloggers, the company has invited them to a media conference to be held at its headquarters in April. In e-mail messages, Wal-Mart has polled several bloggers about whether they would make the trip, which the bloggers would have to pay for themselves.

Mr. Reynolds of Instapundit.com said he recently was invited to Wal-Mart’s offices but declined. “Bentonville, Arkansas,” he said, “is not my idea of a fun destination.”

© 2006 N.Y. Times

Related Exhibit: an e-mail invitation to a blogger

From: Manson, Marshall
To: Rob Port
Subject: Want to go to the center of the universe?
Date: Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 3:29 PM

Rob,

Quick question.

Would you, if the opportunity arose, like to see Wal-Mart from the inside? As in the corporate headquarters in Bentonville, AR?

Unfortunately, we don’t have any funds for travel—but I think I might be able to get your access to the largest company in the world. Tours, briefings, the works. Everything that they would do for a reporter from the New York Times .

I’ve been there, and I can tell you it’s staggering. Just consider this little factoid: every two weeks, the Wal-Mart payroll department direct deposits more than a billion dollars in wages. Yikes.

So – if something like that came up – would you be willing to make a trek to Bentonville and participate? I’d make sure to be there and act as a tour guide.

We’re trying to get a very quick sense of how much interest there might be, so if you’re interested, please let me know as soon as possible (ideally, by tomorrow morning).

Thanks

Marshall
Marshall Manson Edelman
p 202.326.1784, c 703.850.3014
marshall.manson@edelman.com

(Mr. Port shared this communication with WalMartWatch.com)

Uncivil Liberties

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ACLU ‘s argument that “money = speech” undermines democracy

By Jeffrey Kaplan 
Published March 29, 2006

Editor’s note: We were surprised to get some replies to this article accusing us of being anti-ACLU. To the contrary, we value the overwhelming majority of the group’s work and our advocacy work in defending civil rights overlaps regularly. Indeed, we have collaborated with various ACLU state chapters and regularly find ourselves working as allies far more often than as opponents at the national level to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

We simply think the national directors are badly misguided in arguing that corporations and wealthy individuals have a constitutional right to use their money to wield power over others. The matter is central to our mission of revoking corporate control of our country and the ACLU’s active opposition to that work is a significant barrier. We aim to provoke an open and constructive debate.

The American Civil Liberties Union seems to believe that not only does money talk, it has a First Amendment right to do so. In keeping with that highly dubious notion, the ACLU is attacking a Vermont law that limits contributions to political candidates and candidate spending in state elections. In a case now being considered by the U.S. Supreme Court, (Randall v. Sorrell) the ACLU argued the law conflicts with the infamous “money equals speech” doctrine first promulgated by the Court in its 1975Buckley v. Valeo ruling.

Editor’s note: The Court struck down Vermont’s expenditure limit and ruled $200-$400 limits on the amount that one person can donate to any individual candidate per election to be unconstitutionally low.

Although Buckley did allow restrictions on individual contributions, the Court struck down a law limiting the funds a candidate could spend on a national political campaign. Many critics think this decision has hamstrung serious attempts to keep wealth from being a dominant factor in elections.

In its amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief in Randall, the ACLU, like the justices inBuckley, offers up a legal argument that uses “speak” and “money” as if the words were interchangeable: “Above all else,” the ACLU brief (pdf) states, “the Court concluded inBuckley that ‘the First Amendment simply cannot tolerate [the] restriction upon the freedom of a candidate to speak without legislative limit on behalf of his own candidacy’ whether the source of his money is personal wealth or funds raised from legal contributions.”

The ACLU seems oblivious to the fact that there’s a profound difference between who we are (human beings with an inalienable right to self-expression) and what we may possess (money or other forms of property). Democracy is simply not sustainable in any society that confuses the second with the first.

The argument of the Buckley Court was more appropriate to plutocrats who believe they are what they own than to the ACLU, which declares on its website, “If the rights of society’s most vulnerable members are denied, everybody’s rights are imperiled.” The Court reasoned that limiting individual contributions was OK to prevent potential corrupting influence on a candidate, but declared limits on expenditures violated the First Amendment because it created an unjustifiable “restriction on the quantity of political expression.” The Court majority claimed to believe that a candidate’s war chest would be commensurate “with the size and intensity of the candidate’s support.”

Even 30 years ago, that was a dangerously narrow view, especially in light of the Court’s warning in the same decision against “naively” underestimating “the ingenuity and resourcefulness of persons and groups desiring to buy influence.”

Resourceful they have been. Jack Abramoff, now under indictment in the most extensive political corruption scandal in a generation, was a “Pioneer” for President Bush’s re-election campaign in 2004, channeling over $100,000 in individual donations from wealthy donors (those who funneled $200,000 or more were dubbed “Rangers”). The list of the other 548 people who raised $100,000 or more reads like a roll call for Corporate America. Of course, John Kerry’s campaign also relied heavily on such elites.

“Naïve” is too weak a word to describe the ACLU’s attempt to ignore the likelihood such donations had much more to do with business than expressing one’s beliefs. We should beware that criminal acts by the likes of Abramoff and Tom DeLay don’t distract us from the more subtle and completely legal corruption that keeps our representatives from actually representing most citizens.

The Buckley Court ‘s rationale for banning limits on spending by independent organizations that support a candidate was equally suspect. The Court claimed, “The concept that government may restrict the speech of some elements of our society in order to enhance the relative voice of others is wholly foreign to the First Amendment.” So would the Court would consider an ordinance prohibiting the use of bullhorns at town meetings an unconstitutional attempt to “enhance the relative voice” of those without them?

Unfortunately the people with bullhorns are gaining ever-more control. According to a recent Congressional Budget Office report, as of 2003 the top one percent of households in the United States owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth — a staggering 50-percent increase from 38.7 percent just 12 years earlier. During the same time, the wealthy and their allies in Congress repeatedly cut taxes for themselves, while mostbudget cuts targeted the poor .

Though corporations have been banned from contributing directly to candidates for a century, we’re still dealing largely with corporate money here. The Bush campaign gave code numbers to their elite fundraisers, allowing corporate executives to ensure their company was duly credited for donations they solicited. That credit later can be redeemed for access to the administration, if not overt favors.

It is state-granted privileges that allow corporations to amass great power. Governments grant privileges benefiting investors, such as like limited liability and perpetual existence, based on the notion that society as a whole will benefit indirectly.

Democracy is at risk when we permit vast amounts of money accumulated through these privileges to buy power over the political process itself. Even a majority of Supreme Court justices recognized this problem in 1990 when they noted, “the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of [corporate] wealth … have little or no correlation to the public’s support for the corporation’s political ideas.”

Those corrosive effects run far deeper than any corruption scandal. According to testimony at state court hearings leading up to Randall v. Sorrell, “party and party leaders urged legislators not to oppose pharmaceutical interests for fear of being ‘shut off in the next election cycle from any contributions.’”

In other words, the money big donors withhold, not just money they give, helps keep legislators in line. The result is a “chilling effect” — a term the ACLU often employs — whereby certain policies are not even discussed for fear of alienating wealthy donors.

As one witness at a Vermont legislative hearing commented, “there’s an agenda out there that is pretty much set by folks that are not elected.”

The result is a well-founded sense of political disenfranchisement on the part of Vermont (and U.S.) voters. As one former legislator put it, many citizens don’t vote because “They think it’s all wrapped up and that the special interests control it and, quite frankly, they aren’t that wrong.”

It’s not the few overtly corrupt politicians that leave citizen feeling powerless, but the legal and unspoken bias of politicians toward large donors. As a Supreme Court amicus brief  by ReclaimDemocracy.org in Randall v. Sorrell states, “Decent people, after all, typically return courtesies with courtesies and favors with favors without keeping exact track or using quid pro quo calculations.”

In view of its ongoing denial of political reality, the ACLU’s position that the “power, even of a democratic majority, must be limited to ensure individual rights” is replete with irony. In this instance, what the ACLU is ensuring is the “right” of the moneyed minority to exercise political power commensurate with its wealth.

Nor is Randall an anomaly. The ACLU has a track record of helping wealth subvert democracy. In Nike v. Kasky, the ACLU supported Nike Corporation’s claim that its alleged lies about the abuse of Asian factory workers was constitutionally-protected “political speech.”

It’s not clear the ACLU’s advocacy for “corporate free speech” and against limiting the power of money in elections reflects members’ views or merely those of executive staff. Gregory Wonderwheel, a board member of the ACLU’s Sonoma County (CA) chapter has tried to provoke debate within the organization on these positions, but has found staff unresponsive. “The organizational leaders have their own opinions and don’t seem particularly interested in finding out how the grassroots members feel about this question,” said Wonderwheel.

The ACLU has been at the forefront of the legal struggle against the Bush Administration’s assaults on our civil rights and those efforts should be applauded. But given the increasing boldness of those attacks, it’s appalling the organization is diverting members’ donations to fight Vermonters’ right to govern themselves instead of focusing all available energy on those real threats to freedom.

It’s time ACLU members call on the leadership to stop undermining citizens’ right to self-governance and recognize the rights of human beings must take precedent over the power of property.

Jeffrey Kaplan writes for the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of ReclaimDemocracy.org.

Additional Resources

  • Find and contact your state ACLU chapter here to find out if they have a position on the issue and share your concerns.
  • An e-mail form to the ACLU national office is here.
  • To read the ACLU’s explanation on the closely related subject for why it argues for “corporate speech” to be protected by the First Amendment, and responses from ReclaimDemocracy.org, click here.
  • ReclaimDemocracy.org’s amicus brief in Randall v. Sorrell.

© 2006 ReclaimDemocracy.org